> When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Perhaps this is the r

> When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Perhaps this is the religious enchantment you point out being missing from the author. I don't know how you can claim that Tamerlane wasn't "enchanted" in exactly the same sense. Next, the author never claims that this drive is purely modern, in fact, he points out that Francis Bacon is only the patriarch of the modern incarnation of this "ancient human impulse". Adorno and Horkheimer weren't sloppy nor were they stupid enough to forget that mass killings happened before the historical stage of Enlightenment. >And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. This is taken into account with the idea that ideology tends to subsume such impulses to its own ends. The "objectification of humanity" takes on a particular social form, the author claims, in its reduction to a matter of scientific numerical quantity and as Marcuse elaborated, the use of technology in advanced industrial society leading to technological rationality.